My Passport Studio (FW800) no other harddrive works?

Hi!

I recently removed the drive from My Passport studio to use in a Mac Mini (I built my own fusion drive with it and a Intel SSD). Anyway I thought about using a different drive in the My Passport chassi, but I haven’t been able to use any other drive in it. The harddrive starts spinning, but is not mounted. (tried PC and MAC, tried FW800 and Micro USB).

Tried harddrive from diffrent brands (Hitachi, Toshiba, Seagate, Lenovo). Will it only work with the same kind that was first installed in it? or was there some sort of firmware on in?

Has anyone else tried this?

Also when the drive is connected, the system information under FireWire bus the device shows up as “Unknown device” and lists the Maximum speed (800 Mb/s) but no other information is displayed. And nothing shows up in the Disk Utility.

Yes, I did the same - and found your message while looking for a solution. Have not yet found one. It seems that there is (more correct: there WAS) a special image on the HD, containing the virtual CD Image, the software and probably even the serial number. I could get access with the WD uitility tool, but could not restore the WD Software. Checking the disk was not possible. I realized that the serial number disapeared as well with the new HD…

I got an answer from the tech support of WD: 

“Unfortunately we don’t supply a type of portable drive that allows the exchanging of drives, the only kind like that we have are the bigger network units or raid units. The portable drives come with the built in WD Drives and they cannot be replaced. (…) There is no way you can replace the disk in this unit, the one it comes with is the only one that will work because of the encryption on the circuit board. Using any other disk will just cause the unit to fail and the drive will never load. There is nothing we can provide to resolve this issue.”

It seems that WD Passport Studio is  the wrong product for me, lacking the flexibility to exchange the HD in case of crashes, or to obtain different capacities AND getting the possibility of encryption at the same time. 

Bummer – not even another (larger) Western Digital drive will work?